Magazine lovers cherish getting their favourite magazine by post or at the newsstands. Unwrapping it, feeling the weight, sitting down to read it cover to cover … this experience is real.
As a designer and magazine publisher, you, too, love the design process – the creative use of fonts, colours, layout, images, pull quotes, and text only the print medium can express. You are in the right place if you have wondered about duplicating this process to a digital screen.
Embed the flip-book in any of your web pages
Extending this experience
Digitizing the print magazine opens up immense possibilities – additional revenue, actionable intelligence on your readers, and a higher level of engagement.
Rest assured that the free-flowing internet will not destroy your design elements. Digital technologies have evolved to convert your designs into the same pixel-perfect layout.
Digital Magazines
There are many ways to digitize a print magazine. If you prefer the magazine to look the same way as it does in print, the current approach is to create a PDF and share it.
However well designed, the PDF is a non-starter in the digital world. How often have you given up after pinching and zooming through the first page of a PDF on your smartphone? Mobile phones have a large share of all online content consumed – over 70%.
An ideal entry-level option
The next option is to create a flip-book. The flip-book is perhaps the best option if your resources are limited. You can easily package and export the print designs as PDFs and upload them to a CMS platform.
It is still a PDF, but depending on the software platform, one can add many features. Searching for a specific text, enhancing an article with audio, video, and image galleries, creating a table of contents with links, showing thumbnails of pages, and being able to share from each page and printing a single page or the whole magazine builds engagement.
This format works well for mature audiences, primarily consuming content through desk/laptops and tablets. There are many platforms which offer this service, notably issuu.com. But these platforms have limitations, and custom features can get expensive in the long run.
A significant disadvantage in letting a third-party software platform host your flip-book magazine is the lack of control and lost opportunities. If you are trying to build a magazine publishing business with a strong foundation, the place to start is hosting the magazine under your brand and CMS platform. Only then will you be able to maximize your sales, marketing, and advertising channels.
The second option is creating fluid or responsive designs as a parallel process for your print magazine. An existing workflow in InDesign and InCopy allows you to export text readable by most CMSs.
Responsive designs
Responsive designs adapt to any screen size, device, and OS platform (Mac, Windows) by automatically rearranging the layout.
The basic requirements to publish a responsive magazine include a domain name (URL), a website on a hosting platform with excellent security features, a CMS, a primary theme, a theme builder, and plugins.
WordPress, an open-source content platform, powers 43% (W3Techs, 2022) of all websites and is the best workhorse to power all your digital content. Some of the biggest companies use WordPress as their content publishing solution for blogs and articles. The flexibility in terms of design themes and plugins offered for WordPress is vast.
Hybrid solutions
A hybrid solution (Print + flip-books + Responsive) offers maximum control and flexibility and covers all readers and devices.
Stage One: Extend the print designs to create a digital version (flip-book) and host it on your website. You can create marketing campaigns, integrate and automate a CRM (customer relationship platform), and install analytics to gather readership behaviour. Offer print and flip-book versions separately. The flip-book version could be offered as an add-on as well.
Stage Two: A responsive edition is the major piece in your publishing strategy. By adopting a hybrid approach, you can play off the strengths of each format and medium.
Depending on the content, the printed edition can be a skinny option. Show more content in the digital versions. On the printed edition, QR codes can direct the reader to more content in the digital versions.
Create dynamic and interactive ADs in digital versions. This enhancement will invite a different set of advertisers and an enhanced AD pricing option. Animation, interactive stories, audio, video, and charts will increase interest and engagement and help build a loyal audience.
At SITOSO, we follow a process. We follow workflows. What we pursue – creative ways to tell stories – is consistent with every project. Combining this with decades of experience in publishing, advertising, marketing, and information technology, I assure you that your design projects are in safe and reliable hands.
My First Love
Magazines remain my first love. My career in publishing started in the eighties when the ‘web’ was still the domain of spiders. With every twist and turn in the publishing industry, I experimented with print and digital technologies, content management platforms, software (Macromedia Flash onwards), and responsive design for multiple devices.
I believe for print magazines, the way forward is to build on existing designs – design to engage the senses by crafting stories for all mediums. Focus on the content. The technologies to display your stories for all devices is revolving rapidly to match your creativity.
Let us connect. Let us talk. Let us communicate the stories in your magazine to inspire, engage, and inform.
